Celebrity Solstice is the lead ship in what is slated to be a class of five ships. She is a remarkable prototype.With regard to naval architecture, Solstice marries elements of modern cruise ship design with ocean liner design. At the waterline, her bow is narrow and sleek making her more hydrodynamic than a cruise ship. As a result, Solstice can cut through the waves at more than 25 knots. However, as one moves higher, the hull flares outward enabling her to have the revenue producing space of a cruise ship. While the hull design may be traced to the Radiance class ships that were built earlier at the same shipyard for sister company Royal Caribbean International, Solstice is a much bigger ship. She also differs in having a diesel electric powerplant as opposed to the gas turbines on the Radiance class. Inside, Solstice is visually striking. In style, the ship is contemporary with some spaces done with modernistic minimalism while others echo the rich luxury of the past. Everywhere, there has been attention to the lighting and how that affects a room’s appearance and ambiance. Six architectural and design firms in addition to Celebrity’s in-house design team contributed to the project. Celebrity states that its objective is to provide “comfortably sophisticated, upscale cruise experiences with highly personalized service, exceptional dining, and extraordinary attention to detail.” Solstice Cruise Director Dru Pavlov adds: “I feel that we do a pretty good job of walking what can be a precarious line between class, style and elegance, and having a premium experience without being stuffy.”At 122,000 gross tons, Solstice is much larger than Celebrity’s existing ships, holding about one and a half times as many passengers as Celebrity’s Millennium class ships. However, as Simon Weir, Hotel Director on Solstice notes, “this ship doesn’t really show its size.” Indeed, the public areas are laid out in such a way to give the ship the spacious feel of an upscale, contemporary, Manhattan hotel.The larger size of the Solstice class ships and the fact that they are all scheduled to be in service by 2012 poses opportunities and challenges for Celebrity. The opportunities lie in the facts that the line will be able to serve more customers and that with larger ships it has more space to serve those customers. The challenge lies in the fact that it must evolve in order to attract more customers.“Looking at it as an opportunity, being our first new build since Constellation in 2002, why would we do things just the way that we have always done them?” asks Pavlov. “As a company, and particularly with the Solstice class, the idea is to get away from some of the things that we have been doing the same way for a long time. As we get more and more frequent cruisers, [we want to] offer things that they have not seen before. But, it is a bit of a balancing act because you don’t want to abandon what people have come to love about you and what you do.”New innovations are particularly apparent in the areas of dining and entertainment. Solstice features an array of specialty restaurants in addition to a traditional main dining room. These vary in cuisine and style creating a variety of options for the guests. Solstice also features new entertainment venues that enable creative onboard programming.“We are reaching the point where the ship is becoming the destination. Sure, we go to a few places along the way and guests may or may not go ashore but they come to the cruise for the ship. On a seven night itinerary, there will be three days at sea so fully half the time. We are at sea and people want that.”During the winter months when Solstice is sailing the Caribbean, most passengers are Americans. However, especially during the winter holidays, there can be a very sizeable minority of international travelers. “It changes the moment you cross over to Europe or South America or Alaska. Then, [Celebrity] becomes very much an international brand,” explains Weir.With the expansion of the cruise industry, Celebrity very much welcomes international guests. “We cannot focus on one type of guest. We have to be more appealing to our international guests and we really have made that breakthrough at Celebrity. We remain an English speaking experience but we cater very well to our Europeans.”As noted above, during the winter months, Solstice sails the Caribbean out of Fort Lauderdale. In April, she will transit the Atlantic and then sail the Mediterranean out of Rome (Civitavecchia) until November 2009.